Traditional cloth finishes suitable as backing for waterproof coated abrasives have involved saturants and/or other finishing materials dissolved in organic solvents for application to the cloth. Driving off those solvents during manufacture thus leads to a potential air pollution problem. Increased attention to such pollution in recent years has motivated the development of waterproof cloth finishes utilizing only aqueous based finishing materials. While satisfactory for many operations, such finishes and the products coated on them have had substantially less stretch resistance and body than the most rugged traditionally finished products with saturants such as ethyl cellulose.